


Sow You Back Up Like a Garden

by audreycritter



Series: Cor Et Cerebrum [47]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kent farm, Mentions of Violence, Mentions of sex trafficking, Minor Angst, brother bonding, lots of dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-27 03:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17758907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Adult Damian has retired from vigilantism to a quiet life on the Kent Farm. Jason comes to visit after Damian handles an unpleasant situation in town.





	Sow You Back Up Like a Garden

**Author's Note:**

> title from The Wonder Years’ “Pyramids of Salt.”

The raucous barking is the first sign Damian gets that he has a visitor. There’s a buried sensor that sends an alert to his watch, and it buzzes in the next second, but the dogs always notice first.

He waits at the edge of the wide sliding barn door, drying his paint-flecked hands on a rag. If a media van comes down the dip of gravel drive into the hollow, he can make it to the house at a walk and lock the door behind him before they’re even out of the vehicle. 

The car that appears is a hunter green SUV and his deceptively casual stance relaxes into something genuinely casual. He can see Jason’s face behind the windshield and he turns back to the studio-converted barn to toss the rag into a basket for washing later.

Jason is out of the vehicle, stretching his limbs, when Damian reappears. The dogs— a whole pack of seven of them— are bounding and barking joyously around him. One creeps forward to sniff Jason’s outstretched hand, and another two skid on gravel running to Damian and back again.

 _“Tajlus,”_ Damian orders sharply and seven wiggling tails snap down to the ground and the dogs sit. One of them whines, and most of them are having a hard time staying put but they stay nonetheless. 

“Seven now, huh,” Jason says, surveying them. “That must make you Snow White.”

“You didn’t call,” Damian says, turning toward the house. He climbs the steps onto the porch, Jason following, and they go into the house. The dogs spring up behind them and some of them pour into the house with them.

“Call it bad habit,” Jason says, petting one of the dogs. “How are you?”

“You saw the news,” Damian says tightly, stopping in the kitchen. 

“What news?” Jason asks, moving around him to dig in a cabinet for tea. “You want something? My back is killing me after that drive.”

Damian sighs and takes the box from his older brother. “Sit down,” he orders, pointing to a chair. “I know how to be a proper host.”

“Isaac’s at summer camp,” Jason says. “Which means I’m bored. Dad tried to get me to go somewhere more exotic for a few days but I thought I’d come see you.”

“You’re staying,” Damian says, his hand stilled on the kettle. He frowns and measures tea into two diffusers before casting a look at Jason. “I have been led to believe it’s customary to procure an invitation.”

“Oh, stop sounding like Al. It’s annoying. I think you do it on purpose when you don’t want people to argue with you. Of course I won’t stay if you don’t want me to, but then I’m considering all our chess matches to be forfeited by you. Automatic wins for me. I think we probably play, hm, five? Five sounds about right.”

Damian turns back to the counter so Jason can’t see the hint of a smile; he’s too annoyed to admit it yet. “How is Isaac.”

“Loud,” Jason says. “A bottomless pit.”

“Tt.” Damian leaves the kettle to heat and takes a seat across from Jason at the table. It no longer surprises him that Jason looks older— the curling black locks are shot through with early grays, and when Jason brushes his hair behind his ear there’s a flash of hearing aid. 

Damian unconsciously rubs his upper arm, and the straight surgical scars there over the metal-plated bone. He was lucky. Once, he might have attributed it to skill, but he’s lived more than half his life now with the best of the best and they all have their scars and damaged bodies.

It’s not skill, or lack of it, at all. 

A dread cold sits in his stomach and he doesn’t let his body betray any apprehension while he waits for Jason to admit that he lied. Damian doesn’t think the others, even if they saw the news about the violent attack in the tiny Smallville diner, would ever consider it noteworthy.

But Jason, Jason knows. Jason is the other one who walked away, his sole ally and fellow retiree. He understands what it’s like for the adrenaline and blood to be a drug, a reminder of a thousand past sins, and none of the guilt falsely carried.

It took Damian a long time to understand the others didn’t hate him for choosing to put aside the cape. It took Damian a long time to choose to be at peace with the fact that, even without anger, they didn’t truly understand.

Except Jason.

The kettle whistles and Damian stands, dogs who had settled to lie on the floor around him all rousing or springing up at his movement. He hushes them while threading his way through the crowd of furry limbs.

“What happened?” Jason asks, his voice like tempered steel, when Damian’s back is to him.

There is no rush to answer. Damian knows Jason will be patient because they have to be— more than anyone, perhaps even Father, they are two who cannot afford the price for lost tempers. It has been a long, long time since Damian was afraid losing his iron-grip would result in someone’s death, but every loss drags those earliest failures to the surface of memory and he is haunted afresh.

Jason understands this, too. They all excel at self-control, but Damian and Jason _must_. There is no other option left to them.

He wonders if Cassandra understands, sometimes— he suspects she does. But she is far more reticent than Jason, and does not share those inner workings with him very often.

“You did see the news,” Damian says, barely able to summon anger at the earlier blatant pretense of ignorance. “Is Isaac truly at a summer camp?”

“The Young STEM camp at MIT. I blame Tim.”

Damian’s lip curls up into a soft smile at that; it’s easy to hear the pride in Jason’s voice. 

“I saw the news,” Jason admits evenly. “I’m not mad. I’m just worried. Dad and Dickie say you haven’t mentioned it once on the phone. Are you working cases again?”

“No,” Damian said, staring down into the mugs as color bled from the tea infusers in swirls. “It was not a case. It was an…”

Accident is not the right word. He had known exactly what he was doing, when he saw the girl sitting in the truck outside the diner, her eyes glazed over from drugs. He’d lingered at the window, staring at her, instinct blaring alarms in his gut. 

When the thin, wrinkled man with the dirty beard and teeth had come out of the diner to yell at him to leave his wife alone— the girl who looked at least a decade younger than Damian’s own twenty-nine years and was mouthing something to him with languid attention through the polarized glass— what Damian did then was not an _accident_. 

The ambulance had driven off with a police car escorting it because the man was not fit to take into custody without treatment. The girl, who shook like a leaf the entire time a paramedic was giving her a precursory exam, snatched at Damian’s arm long enough to mumble a chattering _thank you, thank you._

Damian knows from the news that she had been reunited with her desperate single mother sometime the next day. He has spent a week in dread of the media, anxious that someone local will give his name and the stories will change from ‘unidentified local man’ to ‘Damian Wayne, son of billionaire.’ 

There will be questions about how he knew, questions about why he’s living on a tiny farm in the middle of nowhere Kansas, in a house lent to him by the estate of Jonathan and Martha Kent. He would handle them, would handle all the questions, but he doesn’t want to have to. He is loath for his quiet little life to be disrupted.

But of course, Jason would know exactly which Smallville resident had hospitalized a sex trafficker with multiple fractures and a severe concussion. Any of Damian’s family must have known the second the story hit any public news.

He still has not explained anything to Jason.

“It was an emergency,” he says simply. “An anomaly.”

“Hmm,” Jason says, taking the cup of tea Damian slides to him. He wraps both his calloused hands around it, dwarfing the mug. Damian’s own hands— long, brown, slender— curl around his own. 

The tea burns when he sips it. He lets it sting his tongue, washing away the images of blood on those same fingers. It doesn’t work. He cannot stop staring at his own knuckles, still haloed with yellowing bruises. He’s staring and his mouth is dry and stinging from the burn. The soft whuffs of sleeping dog are far, far away. 

“Out, out, damned spot?” Jason asks.

Damian doesn’t answer. He knows the reference. He doesn’t like feeling so transparent, like Jason can see right through him. 

“I didn’t come here to hide,” Damian says, ripping his gaze away to scowl at the table.

“I know,” Jason says. “I didn’t say that.”

“I don’t _need_ to hide,” Damian insists. “I like it here. I don’t know why…why it follows me. Why I can’t…”

Breathing is getting harder. Jason leaves the mug at the table to crouch beside him, one hand on Damian’s knee. He doesn’t need to crouch anymore— Damian is taller by inches. Jason does anyway, and it somehow makes Damian feel smaller instead of larger.

“I’ve been fine for months,” Damian says, putting his face in his hands. His elbows dig into the worn wood of the kitchen table, the sanded surface where he spent countless summer lunches as a teen. 

“The nightmares are bad,” Jason says, like a question Damian doesn’t need to answer. 

Damian nods.

“You know you can always call me, if you need—”

“I kill him,” Damian rasps, his mouth buried in his palms. “I snap his neck with my hands. Or Mother is there, handing me the dagger, or…”

He trails off, hoarse like he’s been screaming. 

Jason’s hand is on his lower back.

“I’m staying a few days,” he says. “It’ll get easier. You know that. If you need us to, I’ll bring Isaac back here after camp, or I’ll send Dick. Okay? If you aren’t hiding out here, then don’t hide.”

Damian nods again into his hands and exhales and sits back. Jason stands and tugs him into a one-armed hug, cradling Damian’s head against his chest for a brief second. 

Then, he’s sitting with his tea again, sipping it.

“Isaac’s in a robotics league now. Battlebots.”

“How often does Father help him?”

“Not often,” Jason shrugs. At Damian’s skeptical arch of an eyebrow, he grumbles and corrects, “Okay, a lot. But only because he likes it so much.”

“I’ve finished remodeling the barn,” Damian says. “I have a full studio. I do most of my architecture work there now. I could give you a tour.”

“You always have liked showing off,” Jason teases, reaching across the table to scrub knuckles into Damian’s hair. Damian leans away with an irritated huff. Jason grins. “I’d love to see it, brat.”

They drink tea in silence for a while and Jason’s expression gets more somber and contemplative by the second. Damian’s found it easy to read Jason’s face as they’ve grown, because Jason’s bothered to hide less and less the longer he’s been out of a mask.

“You really like it out here? Alone?” Jason asks, even though they’ve had this conversation before. He raises a hand to stop Damian’s first reply, and adds, “I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m just asking this time.”

Damian reaches down to pet one of the dogs— Henry, a three-legged Labrador mutt from a Wichita rescue— and his knuckles buried in brown fur don’t look quite so brutal or dangerous. He glances out the kitchen window at the broad fields beyond the single line of scraggly trees.

“I do,” Damian says. “I like the quiet. I don’t mind being alone. Ordinarily.”

“Good,” Jason says, his green-flecked eyes studying Damian when Damian turns back to him. Jason smiles again, and this time it’s not a rakish grin— it’s something gentle and warm. It reminds him of Father. “As long as you’re okay.”

“I am,” Damian says, returning the smile. The tea isn’t sweetened but it tastes bright, suddenly— a cleansing kind of earthy in his mouth, with the aftertaste of something clear. 

“Let’s go see that studio,” Jason says, rising and clapping him on the shoulder while he goes to put the mug in the sink. “Maybe I can sit for a portrait.”

“I need to improve my Impressionism,” Damian returns. All the dogs stand when he does and he drops to his haunches to pet heads and be licked by eager, affectionate tongues. “But your face is ugly enough it will be close to realism.”

“If it helps make me famous,” Jason shoots back. “We gotta suffer for our art. I’ll write a monologue about the experience.”

“After you learn to write?” Damian says, leaping away from the smack upside the back of his head that he knows is coming, laughing when he falls into a swarm of concerned dogs. 

They tumble over him, sniffing anxiously and butting their noses into his chest and hands and face. 

For the first time in days, his arms don’t feel like weapons. He breathes wet dog and dry dog and muddy field dog and lets it knit him back together on a little farm in Kansas, where the world is calm and quiet all around him, with his brother by the door. 


End file.
